PvE elements are being added to this PvP Zone, for example the equivalent of Elemental Plateau in Outland is in Lake Wintergrasp.

Siege Combat will be in both Lake Wintergrasp and the new Battleground (see below)

Siege vehicles incude air combat with flying vehicles.

You can destroy the buildings within Lake Wintergrasp and in the Battleground.

Lake Wintergrasp will feature an attack/defend game type. Just like the Auchindoun Spirit Towers, when your faction holds a tower it will keep it for a certain amount of time and retain all the advantage for a few hours.

Northrend “Spirit Shards” will be used to reward players. When your faction controls Lake Wintergrasp all the bosses in Northrend will start dropping them. You can then use these shards to buy rewards from a merchant, they won’t be more powerful any other reward but just an alternative to other sources of equipement (like gearing up for PvP very quickly).

“Wintergrasp Marks of Honor” will drop as well and will be redeemable for items through the honor system and other NPCs.

Bridges will be used as “choke point” in the map, siege vehicles can’t travel through water.

The goal of Lake Wintergrasp is to capture the “Wintergrasp Keep”, everything in that keep is destructable and you will have to break into the keep to capture the point.

Players will be able to control stationnary cannons on each tower to defend the keep.

Bridges are very large and very tall, players should be able to see them from anywhere in the map. They’re also totally destructable as well.

Siege VehiclesThe Demolisher

The Demolisher has both short and long range attacks

It is meant to bombard players and buildings from a long distance, it’s also equipped with a ram to siege buildings.

It can hold up to 3 passengers, passengers are exposed and can be targeted individually. However, players can cast while the vehicle is moving if they’re in it.

Forsaken Catapult

The catapult is faster than the demolisher but its range is slightly lower.

It does slightly less damage.

It cannot hold any pessenger.

The Siege Engine

This is the siege weapon with the longest range.

The gunner is sitting in the turrent and has full control of the turret.

The driver is only moving the vehicle.

The passengers in this vehicle are fully protected but can’t shoot other enemies.

It’s also got a very powerful ramming attack

Flying machine

Flying Machines can bomb enemies, they’re swift but very vulnerable to anti-air attacks.

Goblin Shredder

The shredder is an anti-air vehicle.

It will use anti-air rockets, they’re long range homing missiles.

This is a personal armor suit, if the vehicle is destroyed the player just jumps out and keep fighting on his own.

You can use your sawblade as close range melee attacks.

The shredder can jump into the air just like rocket boots for players. This can also be used to jump over walls.

The shredder is very vulnerable to siege damage.

Arenas

The point is to keep arenas simple, while leaving room to innovate.

Stream lost at this point, will update later.

Dalaran Arena

The arena is fairly small and mounts won’t be allowed here.

Arenas will introduce new “movable” objects, changing the line of sight of the battlefield every few seconds in the arena. For instance pillars might go up and down randomly, on a timer, etc …

There is a pipe coming from the ceilling, every once in a while a column of water will start dropping from this pipe.

Each team will start in a pipe on one side of the map, as the match begins a column of water will “push” the teams out of their pipes to prevent camping.

Orgrimmar Arena

There might have objects dealing damage to players, pillars moving up and down based on a timer. There will be visual signs on the battleground to warn players before something happens.

Triggered objects will deal damage to players, for example when the pillars go down spikes will come up.

Teams will be very close to each other at the beginning of the match. Players will start in elevators rising from the ground and will start 10 yards away from the enemy team.

Mounts will be allowed in this arena.

If you stay on a pillar when it rises up you go up with it.

There will be spikes around the elevators, they will go down a few seconds after you reached the fighting area to let you the time to check what classes you’re facing.

Northrend Battleground

This battleground is located on an island south of Dragonblight

This is also an attack/defend game type battleground.

One team will attack and the other one defend, you will have a specific amount of time to succeed. After the end of the round teams will switch sides.

Attackers will come from boats and defenders will start in the middle of the beach.

There are 3 sections of walls in the Area, after each wall there are capture points and graveyards to make the attack on the next points faster.

Attackers will get more siege vehicles depending on their progression throughout the siege.

The battleground will be either 10vs10 or 15vs15, this isn’t decided yet.

Q&A

The battleground reporting system is being tuned to let player police themselves easier.

A spectator mode is planned, but devs keep in mind that some players won’t want to have other players spectacting them.

Everything is done to make outdoor PvP more pleasant and prevent server crashes. All objectives in Wintergrasp are all spaced appart to prevent players from gathering at the same point, that’s also why there are a lot of rivers in the zone.

There isn’t any plan to add racial abilities to each race.

PvP rewards won’t be changed, you will still be able to get some of the best item for some slots from the honor system, and the 5-part set from the Arenas.

Battlegrounds starting without even teams is definitely a problem. Some changes will be made to the queue system to prevent the overlapping between the queues of each battleground and make sure that matches start with the same amount of players on each side.

Raids & Dungeons Panel

Quote from Blizzard staff

Raids & Dungeons

There will be 8 Level Up dungeons and 4 Max Level Dungeons.

There will be a 10/25 players mode for each raid dungeon.

Heroic dungeons will be made slightly easier, at least devs are going to make sure you don’t necessarily need a specific class like a prot warrior to complete it.

Some dungeons were too long in Burning Crusade and completing a dungeon shouldn’t take more than an hour.

Quests didn’t feel as connected as they should and dungeons quest should implicate a bit more in the background of the instance. Killing bosses might even have an impact on the world.

Gun’drak will be a level 80 Dungeon and the last objective of a huge questline going through the whole zone (Zul’Drak).

Black Temple and Hyjal Summit were released too early, on a second thought it would probably have been better to release Zul’aman first instead of postponing it for more than a year. Developpers are going to make sure that Arthas is and feels like the final boss of Wrath of the Lich King.

Attunements to enter Heroic instances will be removed.

Reputation

You will be able to earn reputation toward a specific faction by becoming its “champion”, for example by wearing a Cenarion Circle tabard while running Hellfire Ramparts you will earn reputation for both Honor Hold/Thrallmar and Cenarion Circle. Obviously tabards reputation requirements will be changed to something like friendly/honored.

Itemization

More PvP gear will be delivered through the PvE system, it won’t be the best gear but it will give you a chance to get started.

More PvP gear will be added as reputation rewards.

More items will drop from 25-man dungeons.

Items will be changed by removing “unecessary” stats to make them usable by more classes at the same time.

More recipes and plans will be added to the game, with a better representation between professions. Even if some recipes will still drop from a specific boss in a dungeon like in BC, devs will try to make some of them easier to obtain.

Death Knights

Death Knights will be able to tank 5-man, heroics, raids dungeons, but in a “different” way. It will also fill a few more roles and won’t be here just to tank.

The Oculus (LVL 80 Dungeon – Borean Tundra)

The dungeon will allow players to use flying mounts, parts of the dungeon will allow you to get a drake and combat while mounted by using different abilities of each drake. Some drakes will be able to tank, some will heal, others will DPS.

Halls of Stone (LVL 77-79 – Storm Peaks)

Halls of Stone will be located in Ulduar in Storm Peaks.

All the dungeons in Ulduar were built by Titans and will really feel huge, however devs didn’t want players to need a mount or anything like that to go through it and tried to keep it small.

The storyline of Uldaman will continue in Ulduar.

Caverns of Time: Stratholme (LVL 80 – Tanaris)

The faction requirement on the Caverns of Time teleport will be removed.

The dungeon is fully scripted just like Old Hillsbrad. There are a couple of timed encounters, it will be non-linear and you will be able to choose your encounters.

Players will be fighting alongside Prince Arthas before he falls to the Lich King.

The same voice acting as Warcraft 3 will be used in the instance. (Jaina / Arthas / Uthar)

The Infinite Dragonflight storyline will continue here.

Q&A

Whenever it’s possible, devs would prefer to deliver legendary items through quests like Atiesh instead of having them just drop from Bosses.

There won’t be any attunement for heroic or entry level raid instances. The remaining attunements will be very simple to understand.

“Wipe management” is a very important part of the design and developpers are doing their best to make sure that corpse run in dungeons aren’t too long.

Titles might be added for kills, entering a specific area, etc …

More tokens will drop to minimize the impact of randomization, sometimes increasing the amount of items dropping from a boss isn’t enough.

Dungeons aren’t going to be overall easier, but will be more accessible. Bosses might not be easier to kill but will be easier to understand for new players.